Video: Banking for the Common Good

Banking for the Common Good

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Banking for the Common Good – interview with Mary Houghton, Ethical Markets Media, 2013. Mary Houghton is the co-founder of ShoreBank, once the largest and oldest community development bank in the US. Hazel Henderson interviews Mary Houghton about community development banking movement today.

Houghton, along with Milton Davis, James Fletcher, and Ron Grzywinski purchased what was then South Shore Bank to fight redlining in the Chicago neighborhood. She retired as president in May 2010.

ShoreBank was a community development bank founded and headquartered in Chicago. At the time of its closing it was the oldest and largest such institution, and in 2008 had $2.6 billion in assets. It was owned by ShoreBank Corporation, a regulated bank holding company. ShoreBank had branches in Chicago’s South and West sides, Cleveland, and Detroit. Between 2000 and 2006, ShoreBank issued nearly $900 million in loans to citizens in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. ShoreBank and its affiliated companies have projects in 30 countries.

In the early 1980s, Houghton and Grzywinski worked with Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Yunus and Grameen Bank received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize). From 1986 to 2001, Houghton served on the Board of Directors of Accion International. Houghton serves as a director of the Calvert Foundation, the Rapid Results Institute, and Women’s World Banking. She is a member of the Ashoka Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship. Houghton received a B.A. cum laude from Marquette University and an M.A. in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University.

Houghton has received several awards and honors:

In 2001, she was awarded Honorary Doctorate of Business by Northern Michigan University.

In 2004, she was named “Community Banker of the Year” by American Banker magazine http://www.americanbanker.com/magazine/ for her work making ShoreBank “the gold standard of community development banks.”

In 2009, Houghton accepted the 2009 Economic Opportunity Achievement Award from The Opportunity Collaboration in Ixtapa, Mexico for her work “providing financial services and information to residents who were excluded from traditional banking circles.”

In 2009, she was invited to deliver the “Leaders Forum Lecture” at the Yale School of Management.

Jointly with co-founder Ron Grzywinski, Houghton received the Hesburgh Award for Ethics in Business from the University of Notre Dame, in 2008, and the Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award at Harvard University, in 2006. They were both named to U.S. News & World Report’s list of America’s Top Leaders.

Hazel Henderson is the founder of Ethical Markets Media, LLC http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/ and the creator and co-executive Producer of its TV series. She is a world renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, consultant on sustainable development, and author of The Axiom and Nautilus award-winning book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and eight other books. She co-edited, with Harlan Cleveland and Inge Kaul, The UN: Policy and Financing Alternatives, Elsevier Scientific, UK 1995 (US edition, 1996), and co-authored with Japanese Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda, Planetary Citizenship (2004).